WESTON, Harold. Banquet for Furies. London: Rich and Cowan. 1934. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s pale red cloth lettered in black to spine, in the dust jacket signed an unidentified ‘WSD’ displaying the frenzied protagonist amid the rugged island landscape forming a part of her. A very good copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and just gently rolled. The textblock edges with some light spots, and the text often fine with a handful of sporadic spots throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (8s 6d net) and several small closed tears to edges, the largest to front panel joint, and a little rubbing to some corners. A bright and pleasing example overall.
The scarce first edition of this unusual Freudian novel which has many hallmarks of 30s modernism—the breadth of characters, Romanticism, individualism, isolation, even the sheer density of the book—nearly 500 pages. A pastiche of adventure, romance, detective, and psychological themes, the novel follows a seemingly deranged woman, thwarted and thwarting, who descends into madness in her journey to become monarch of a remote island off the coast of Britain, wilfully exiling all who oppose her, and after two decades of despotism, we witness her quite bizarre spiritual downfall. Little is known of the author, sadly. He wrote at least four novels, most of which appeared in the UK and US; this edition precedes its US counterpart by one year, but I cannot be sure as to his nationality—we presume he is not the modernist painter of the same name. A scarce and certainly alluring book.
WESTON, Harold. Banquet for Furies. London: Rich and Cowan. 1934. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s pale red cloth lettered in black to spine, in the dust jacket signed an unidentified ‘WSD’ displaying the frenzied protagonist amid the rugged island landscape forming a part of her. A very good copy overall, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and just gently rolled. The textblock edges with some light spots, and the text often fine with a handful of sporadic spots throughout. The dust jacket unclipped (8s 6d net) and several small closed tears to edges, the largest to front panel joint, and a little rubbing to some corners. A bright and pleasing example overall.
The scarce first edition of this unusual Freudian novel which has many hallmarks of 30s modernism—the breadth of characters, Romanticism, individualism, isolation, even the sheer density of the book—nearly 500 pages. A pastiche of adventure, romance, detective, and psychological themes, the novel follows a seemingly deranged woman, thwarted and thwarting, who descends into madness in her journey to become monarch of a remote island off the coast of Britain, wilfully exiling all who oppose her, and after two decades of despotism, we witness her quite bizarre spiritual downfall. Little is known of the author, sadly. He wrote at least four novels, most of which appeared in the UK and US; this edition precedes its US counterpart by one year, but I cannot be sure as to his nationality—we presume he is not the modernist painter of the same name. A scarce and certainly alluring book.
